Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Luke 24:13-36

Before we look at this post-Easter story, I want to remind us all of a pre-Easter story. Let’s go back to the Sea of Galilee, way back in chapter 8 of Luke’s Gospel. There we find the disciples and Jesus on a boat headed out into the waves, when a storm comes up and everyone is terrified. They wake an exhausted Jesus up, who is sleeping through the whole thing, and he says, “Have you no faith at all?” In Mark’s gospel, he calms the storm by saying, “Be quiet!”, which is sometimes translated as him shouting to the clouds, “Peace!” and everything gets still. It’s what we often think peace is, especially those of us who have kids, though the word in Greek in that calming the sea section of Mark is the word for “quiet” or “stillness”, and not the word eirene (ear-eh-ne), which is the word for peace. Translators have just taken some liberty with the word usage, perhaps because for a long time, we have thought that peace means calm, or the lack of conflict, or passiveness. But this is not the peace that Jesus leaves with us.

Many of us have been longing for a little quiet, a little stillness so we can rest after a long two weeks of perpetual outrage and moral indignation, which is NOT is short supply these days. The teacher walkout is over. Only it’s not. The unions may have called it off, the districts may have called it off, but the teachers, I’m telling you right now, have not called it off…and they’re the ones who called it on in the first place. The teachers I talk to aren’t really sure what they’re going to do now but I suspect this will be a very interesting week to come, as frustration and anger find new targets and we find out just how destructive and divisive a good rally can become.

I’ve been reminded a lot recently in this time of resistance and organization, and lack of organized resistance, of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – particularly near the 50th anniversary of his assassination. I think it’s important for us to remember the details of the last portion of his life. King had come to Memphis not for voting rights, but for the rights of sanitation workers to receive living wages, to strike if the need was there and to speak out against a system that was dependent on their work but kept them powerless and poor…just like slavery. He gave a now famous speech to the gathered workers, where he says, “I have looked down from the mountain and I have seen the promised land…” before the haunting line, a harbinger of the next morning, “I may not get there with you.” That is seared into our memories. But before that speech, there was a march. It was a march of sanitation workers into downtown Memphis that exploded into violence and chaos, causing Dr. King and his allies to flee the march and damaging his claim of non-violent protest as well as his dedication to the cause. But he returned. He came back to Memphis because he had seen the promised land, and it was a land where what happens to you, happens to me…where we are interconnected…tied together, as he wrote, in a single garment of destiny.

Dr. King meant something else by peace, too. He meant peace as a way of life, rooted in the practice of non-violence, and he had to spend a lot of time explaining the tactics of that non-violence, both to his own people and to the world outside that circle. Non-violent resistance asserts, first and foremost, that one can resist evil without resorting to violence. It seeks understanding and opposes evil itself, rather than scapegoating the person committing the evil act. It believes that suffering itself can be redemptive, so it does not turn away from sacrificial work. While it most certainly avoids physical violence, it also avoids the internal violence of spirit, resisting the urge to hate those who hate, for instance. And nonviolent resistance, in the way that Dr. King practiced it, must have a “deep faith in the future,” stemming from the conviction that “the universe is on the side of justice”.

This is a mighty task on the best of days, made infinitely more difficult when the chips are down and the feelings of disappointment and dissatisfaction rule the day. This is the challenge of the next few weeks, to reshape a walkout into a movement, to find the energy and drive to move past the moment and continue to ask ourselves, after victory or defeat, what now?

This is precisely where the disciples found themselves on the road to Emmaus, broken and distraught over the murder of Jesus, they talk. The text says, “about all the things that had happened”, but we don’t really know what that means. They had heard the news of the tomb, but what details did they have? Facebook would have come in really handy for them – snap a selfie next to the rolled away stone and list the details…#he’sback. But, alas, that’s not how it worked then. So they were left to wonder as they wandered, talking to this “stranger”, amazed at how uninformed he is.

The “what now” of the situation is pretty lost on them, other than to get to the next town and regroup. When the hidden Jesus explains everything to them, they don’t get it. When he details the scriptural connections, emphasizes to them how “slow of heart” they are, they don’t budge. It is not until they stop for the night and, seeing that he plans to walk on alone into the darkness, they welcome him in, they share their food, they are hospitable, engaging in some basic humanity to this stranger….and when the bread is broken, then they recognize Jesus…and he vanishes.

Only they did recognize something they now realize. Their hearts were burning, they recall, as he spoke to them about the connections, as he explained things to them. I don’t really know what that means – their hearts were burning. Maybe some Tums would help? Or maybe it is something more like the feeling I’ve had over the past couple of weeks as I witnessed strangers linking arms and chanting for support, as I’ve seen and helped my colleagues trying hard to make their church a stand-in for all that TPS does on a daily basis, as I’ve stood with teachers who all know what it means to care for other people’s kids as if they were their own. In those moments we really knew what it meant to be together, how community ought to work. Maybe that’s what the disciples were feeling, like the words of their rabbi were actually real, and they could trust in them even when it looked like failure…that there will still another chapter to come, even after Rome thought they had eliminated the problem.

This is what I think some people in power have in mind now. The walkout is over. Therefore that little effort is dead. Back to business as usual. Only they had 600 people file to run for office – a record. And the conversations are still happening. And parents and students and, yes, even some teachers will still be at the Capitol on Monday morning. And we know what community looks and sounds and feels like, we know what it is like to have a table where we pull up extra chairs and we’re not going back to business as usual.

The disciples regroup with the others as our story continues, and they recount this experience with the risen Christ, all of whom have had similar encounters. And suddenly Jesus appears among them and says – Peace be with you. It is the single most repeated phrase from the resurrected Christ. Peace be with you. And though he comes each time with the greeting of peace, it is not quiet or stillness that he offers. The word, in Greek is eirene, which comes from the root verb eiro, meaning to join or bind together that which has been separated. The peace of the risen Christ is the ability to bind together that which has been separated. It stands in direct contrast to a violence which, as Dr. King wrote, “is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.” It is not simply the absence of war, as the Greek implies, but rather more like the Hebrew shalom that Jesus almost certainly had in mind when he gave this greeting…a shalom that comes from being in right relationship with God and one another.

So when the risen Christ says, “Peace be with you”, it is not a state of blessed euphoria or the granting of happiness, prosperity and personal well being. No, it is his peace that he leaves with them, a peace that Jesus taught them was based in trust and hope and the active living of it – there is no way to peace, peace is the way. This is not a statement of passivity or retirement into apathy. No, when we as Christians, as followers of the risen Christ say, “peace is the way”, just as surely as when we say, “peace be with you”, we ought to mean what Jesus meant – we are inviting one another to a new reality, a way to be in the world, and it isn’t everyone for themselves. It is the way of community, the way of shalom – of right relationship with God and one another, the way that gathers together what has been separated and seeks to create systems and laws with the same goal. This is why I say that when we, as Christians, seek things to support in the world, we could scarcely find better things than public education and a strong social safety net. We seek these things not as partisan platform, but because we believe that this is what leads us to wholeness, this kind of common good and love for neighbor is part of the abundant life that Jesus has promised…the peace he leaves with us.

I can tell you that we have some foundation already, some leverage for our own hearts in the memories of the past days, where a community came together to respond to one another’s needs…where perfect strangers looked after one another’s children and we filled tables with food and drink for anyone who would come to the table. It was a secular metaphor for our Christian metaphor – the table where all are welcome for no other reason than they are a human being. And I’ll tell you, I wasn’t sure that still existed out there in the numbers that I saw over the past two weeks. A BIG takeaway for me, one that helps soften the blow of an uncooperative legislature, is that we gathered…we set a table for one another…we bound together people who have felt separated, me included, and we felt our numbers and saw that what we hold in our own hearts, something we thought was “just us”, or maybe “just my church”, could actually be bigger than we imagined.

In these times of great turmoil and separation we must remember to take every chance to gather together, to come to the various tables around which we live. For we all know that there are things separated which must be bound back together…like our social fabric, our sense of common good, like our commitment to the simple and radical idea that either all of us matter or none of us do. For Christ will not be known to us in the loudest praise, or in the correctness of our theology. Christ will not be known to us in our righteous anger or our vengeful retaliation, no matter how justified. Christ will be known to us in the breaking of the bread…in the invitation…in the hope of a table set for everyone, where either all of us matter or none of us do. That’s when we’ll recognize Christ…who’s been standing beside us the whole time.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

John 20:19-29

So we pick up our story – you remember, the story from last week…little thing we call Easter? Well, in our scripture, it’s still the same day, just later in the evening. The disciples aren’t quite dancing in the streets with the news of the return of Jesus. In fact, they’re cowering in an upstairs room, an undisclosed location, as they say. Jesus comes to them and says – peace be with you. And this was before they learned to say – and also with you. But first he shows them his hands and side, the text says. THEN we get the story of “doubting Thomas”, who has become sort of the poster child for faithless skepticism. But wait, Jesus shows the other disciples his hands and side, too, at least according to John’s version of the story. Yet they seem to expect Thomas to believe without seeing what they got to see. There’s plenty of doubt to go around in this story, no need to hang it all on Thomas, and before we disparage doubt, let’s give it a chance.

The title of the sermon in your bulletin will NOT match what you hear this morning. Perhaps it’s better that you title this “the Miracle of Doubt” in your heads because I, like lots of my colleagues, scrapped what I had planned earlier in the week as I rushed around between here and the Capitol and various sites along the route the walkers are taking between Tulsa and OKC, always encountering the inspiring vision of teachers who have had enough. Enough of the inattention, enough of the lack of support, enough of the words with no corresponding action. Despite the promises of the legislature, they have their doubts.

So, let’s talk a little about doubt. We have a lot of it around right now. We have parents who doubt they can figure out another thing for their kids to do with another day off school. We have seniors who doubt they can get the instruction needed to pass their exams and graduate. And we have a group of legislators who continue to make the mistake of doubting the resolve of people who teach kindergartners all day, endure the eye-rolls and heavy sighs of teenagers and keep 6th graders engaged on shoestring budgets and no bathroom breaks. And all of us, I suspect, at least have moments of doubt that we can ever resolve all of the things that seem so wrong, so broken, so battered. Doubt is real. And, God knows, it is around us all the time.

But doubt is not necessarily a bad thing at all. In fact, it is a necessary part of our faith lives. After all, if we are certain about something, there’s really not much need for faith, is there? Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance in what we do not see, the writer of the Book of Hebrews tells us. It is not knowing something for certain, but trusting in something that often is not even visible to us at the time. Faith is, in one way of looking at it, confidence in the things we aren’t certain about, or deep trust in profound doubt. This is, of course, a balancing act – too much doubt can lead to cynicism, which paralyzes us, making us unhelpful to any cause for change. Too little doubt and we face the dangers of certainty, which often leads to a false sense of righteousness that is never healthy.

When we embrace a healthy sense of doubt, we allow ourselves to move beyond the overly simplistic. Doubt asks us to check our facts again, to consider another point of view and to approach things with some humility. A good, balanced sense of doubt can actually help us navigate the tricky waters of an increasingly pluralistic, diverse and often chaotic world in the 21st century. Doubt helps encourage us to seek new information and new experiences, lest we get trapped in a single story. People who live in such bubbles only get exposed to what they already know where a healthy sense of doubt gets weakened by what is a false sense of security, generated by unchallenged stories and untested assertions. Our echo chambers, safely free from doubt, don’t develop in us the sense that something beyond our own experience might also be valid. Then it is our habits, our values, our identity, culture, food, music – that gets stamped as the default. Everything else is abnormal.

This assumption, you might notice, is being challenged mightily right now, which is part of what lies at the roots of the cultural angst in which we are living. People who live in those bubbles, whose cultural norms and identities have been the default setting for so long don’t like this change. And who can blame them? It fills one with great doubt when such foundational things are threatened. And when doubt is an unfamiliar feeling you think it dangerous, when it is, in fact, quite a healthy place to be.

See, I don’t blame Thomas at all. Having just had all of his dreams shattered, his vision of a messiah come to save them lashed to a tree and murdered just like all the other ones, his glorious vision of magic resolution to suffering not only unrealized, but heaped upon with even more suffering. Of course he wants to see the wounds. Doubt has been his companion for a long time. It is, after all, the disciples whom Jesus often has the hardest time convincing. They retreat into bickering, the fall asleep when he asks them to watch, they don’t understand the parables, they abandon Jesus at the first opportunity – though they have left their lives behind to follow him, they doubt.

I have to be honest with you. I don’t know how this walkout ends. People have been asking me that all week long and I don’t know if anyone knows how this walkout ends, and we certainly don’t know when. In many powerful ways this is beyond a single event – a walkout – and has become a movement. And there have been and will be great moments of doubt about it’s effectiveness, it’s orchestration, even it’s validity. I’m sure we have all wondered, especially our teachers, if the high cost that is in place for students, parents, guardians and the downstream workers in our school systems is worth all of this. We doubt whether our legislature will act effectively, or at all. I, at times, wonder if enough legislators even care about public education in the first place, that’s how cynical I can get. But I also know this. That doubt has to birth some vision of the future. We have to be able to imagine what happens after this single thing – after the walkout, whether educators get everything they want or just some of what they want. What is next for this movement?

For regardless of what happens with education in our state, we all know where we stand right now. Yes, near the bottom in per-pupil spending for years, and no raises for state employees or teachers in a decade, but also amongst the highest incarceration rates in the nation, some of the worst health rankings in the country, second in teen birth rates, tenth in rates of suicide, and 22% of our kids living below the poverty line. All of this at a time when racism, bigotry, xenophobia, sexism and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and actions have increased, mass shootings keep happening, ICE raids are no longer just going after the so-called “bad guys”, but deporting anyone they can get their hands on, and public outrage makes it feel like things are going to explode. Is it any wonder that we have some doubt? I want God to show up. I want to see the wounds, too, to touch the side, to know that the promise is more than just an idea. Sometimes faith is like that…a shot in the dark, a trust fall, sometimes it is just like Dr. King once said, “taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

I stood on the steps of Webster High School Wednesday morning, in the cold air with friends and colleagues to send a group of teachers, parents, students and supporters off on a 110 mile journey from Tulsa to the Capitol building in Oklahoma City. They are walking. You’ve probably seen this in the media – they are being joined by our superintendent, Dr. Deborah Gist. Wednesday was also the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King in Memphis. I reminded the crowd gathered there that Dr. King fought for civil rights, but that alone was not what got him killed. He fought for racial justice, but that alone was not what got him killed either. It was when he began to draw some connections, to show some intersections between racism and poverty, human rights and a military industrial complex that the tide really turned. We must remember as we celebrate holidays in his name and post quotes on our social media sites that when he was shot dead in Memphis, he was commonly listed among the most hated people in the United States, unpopular for his years and years of advocacy and agitation. Righteousness, my friends, rarely comes with popularity and, we must also remember,
change does not come in a single event. It takes time and dedication and consistency.

When Jesus first comes to the disciples in John’s version, it isn’t just to prove something to them. It is not to assuage their doubt, even though he shows them his hands and side. It is to say to them – twice, in fact – peace be with you. And to give them a charge – “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
In other words, go do what I have done. Be like me in the world. Dedicate yourself to the Way I have taught you. Please note that his Spirit-breathed direction never says anything about making sure other people follow the rules, or being certain about your eternal life, or the golden rule as we seem to have it now – he who has the gold makes the rules. No, this is an initiation into a walk of life that offers no guarantees, trusts in grace rather than perfection and absolutely depends on trust that God is with us in all things, moving in us, growing with us and being an eternal source of creativity and light. And it is trusting in that path, even when we doubt it.

As we consider the holiness of doubt, this is why I want to take us back to Holy Week…but not to Easter, and not to Good Friday. No, I want to take us to Maundy Thursday and to the table where Jesus sat with his disciples and announced God’s purpose in the world – love and grace given away to people at a table where everyone is welcome. A table where we can’t figure out how things work, where we use this language of body and blood and it’s kind of weird when you stop to think about it. A table where the most important theological statement we might make right now, at this time, in this place, is that this table is open to everyone because that means that God is available to everyone and therefore human dignity and grace and compassion and our basic identity as children of God is available to everyone. As Christian historian Diana Butler Bass asks, why don’t we focus ourselves on that instead of the cross, which is Rome’s violent disruption of the Jesus plan?

“The cumulative narrative of the post-Easter stories,” Dr. Bass says, “is that of Jesus gathering with his friends and followers around tables. Jesus is continuing the Table story post-Easter, not re-enacting the cross.” And I offer you a metaphor this morning for this table. Public schools. This is the place in our society where teachers try to reach all the kids, even the ones we have doubts about…this is where we welcome everyone, saying to them in that action that we all matter. Teachers live with doubt all the time, the kind of doubt that allows faith to take over, directing us to places we can’t go if we guide ourselves only by data and evidence of past achievements. Teachers imagine for their kids a future. They dream, sometimes even dream on their students’ behalf, as the students learn to dream for themselves. The doubt helps fuel imagination for what isn’t there yet.

Maybe we ought to still learn something from our teachers – like the faithful example of starting to walk when you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into. We watched last night as the teachers prepared to eat their dinner in the fellowship hall at First Christian in Chandler, a doctor tending to their feet, the limps as they made their way to the buffet line, the new chants they were sharing as they prepare for another day of rhythmic walking – “rain, snow earthquake, lightning, nothing can stop us from doing the right thing!!” Yet you could see it in their eyes. They don’t really know where this all goes, they doubt they will get all the things they need, they live with the uncertainty of the path forward, with a future they cannot see. And still they walk.

“Have you believed because you have seen me?
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Mark 16:1-8

This just in – breaking news! The state legislature has just restored full funding to the core services of government and set us on a bright & stable path! Of course you know what I’m going to say next – April Fools.

Easter comes at such a hard time this year. Not only is it on April Fools, and what does one do with that liturgically, but why put it at the end of Holy Week? Don’t they know us pastors are real tired? I find myself fretting every year over what to say in this very sermon and I rarely have the energy or creativity left after a Palm Sunday, a Maundy Thursday, and a Good Friday to give it the justice I think it deserves. And this year, even more so because I’ve spent a lot of extra time planning for, organizing with and debating over a planned teacher walkout. This year I am tired, not only physically and mentally tired, but soul tired from the mix of perpetual outrage and the onslaught of challenges that leave me feeling that I’m constantly trying to get a drink from a firehose.

The more I read this week, the more I listened to commentaries and wrestled with stories that would fit, and tried to prepare for this moment in the best way I could, the more I found myself thinking – why mess with this? Why do I feel like I need to work Easter to have Easter work? Why not just let it work? Its really rather arrogant, you know? To think that I can top Easter. I mean, how do you top resurrection? “Yeah, so there’s being raised from the dead and all that, but wait until you hear this sermon!”

Today is the bookend of our High Holy Days, Christmas on one side and Easter Sunday on the other – the whole life of Jesus in between, something we gloss over far too often in the mainstream theology of our time. We are surrounded by what a colleague of mine used to call “Airport Christianity”, only concerned with arrival and departure, no room for the life as we rush from birth to resurrection.

What Easter says to us, however, is that the life of Jesus matters. After all, we don’t acknowledge that someone was crucified, LOTS of people were crucified in Jesus’ time. What is important is that Jesus was crucified. And it’s not just resurrection that is critical, though being raised from the dead is, I grant you, rather special all by itself.
But for Christians it is that JESUS was raised from the dead. Jesus was lifted up, raised up the Greek says, as God’s great “YES” to the Jesus plan. God’s affirmation that the way of Jesus, rather than some role Jesus plays leads us from death to resurrection, so that Jesus ceases to be some magic talisman, and instead models for us in his life a trust in God that we can emulate. And when we have trust in God like Jesus had trust in God, then we too can participate in the kin-dom. It’s the meaning behind the Easter story – that the resurrection of Jesus would compel us to live lives of resurrection, to live as Easter people. No longer does death hold any sway on us, no longer will fear rule our decisions, no longer will we turn away from compassion, from hope, from trust – from the things that bring life, but can now live fully into hope and promise and that wonderful, beautiful story does the same thing for us that it does for the women at the tomb – it scares the crap out of us.

I mean, I’d much rather the story be that Jesus pays the price for our sins and I can just believe in him and move on with my life. If I have to believe like him…yikes…we just saw what happened to that guy! Even if great beauty is part of this equation, we’re still viscerally aware that it is life, death and resurrection…and it’s the death part that stops us in our tracks. Yet we need that transcendent story, the power of the “joy comes in the morning” assertion that enables us to make it through the brutality and suffering. It’s what makes Holy Week so difficult, because we have to be able to take the ugliness of the cross, the cruelty that we know lives in our own world in so many ways, and hold that in tension with the beauty of Easter morning and the amazement of an empty tomb. Being able to experience pain and loss and to still imagine love and hope is precisely what is critical to seeing Easter not as an event, but a way of living.

This is perhaps what happened for the disciples, not so much on Easter morning but in the days and weeks and years that followed as they began to live Easter and to understand the connections between a Jesus who was executed, sentenced to the death penalty by the religious & political elites because of his inauguration of the Kin-dom of God, and their own lives.

The Easter story from Mark ends very abruptly. In Greek, the final sentence of this passage literally reads, “and coming swiftly they fled from the tomb it had them trembling and amazing and to anyone nothing they said they feared for.” Part of that weirdness is because of how Greek sentence structure is different than ours, but it does end with a “for”, and even the Greeks don’t end their sentences with prepositions. The word gar in Greek is a conjunction…it’s like Mark wrote this to end mid sentence, like perhaps he means to suggest even down to the grammar that the story isn’t over. After all, if they had really fled and said nothing to anyone, we wouldn’t be here, would we? Mark’s assertion was so unsatisfying that we have three other versions of what happened Easter morning in the other gospels, AND there is also a so-called “longer ending” of Mark, another 12 verses that our earliest versions of Mark don’t contain this abrupt ending.

Maybe it means that the story is still going on, that resurrection wasn’t a one time deal, or Easter a single day on the calendar, running around between March and April.
Maybe it means that we are meant to live Easter, as Easter people, trusting in the cycle – life, death and resurrection. But that means expecting it and expecting it means looking for it and looking for it means that we have to know what resurrection looks like. And a story from 2000 years ago doesn’t always do the trick. Where can we see resurrection today? Perhaps we should consider a group of teenagers from Florida who have looked in the face of death, said, “No more!” and are marching their way into new territory, taking heat and breaking down barriers that we thought unbreakable. Or what about the continued efforts of people of color to stand and shout, “Black Lives Matter” in the face of overwhelming odds, a justice system that fails them again and again, and encounter after encounter with law enforcement that goes south, sometimes with 21 shots fired into a young man holding a cell phone, 7 of them in his back? Might we look closer to home? Like an impending teacher walkout – tomorrow, in fact – that is not just about salaries, which are woefully low, but clearly about whether or not we’re going to put our money where our mouth is, for there is not a single legislator who will publicly call for the degradation of teachers or the dismantling of public education. To which I reply, quoting James Baldwin, I want to believe what you say, but I see what you do.

Look, I know it’s cold and wet out there today, and that yesterday was this strange mix of sun and clouds, but the trees are budding, the flowers are blooming, the stinky Bradford Pears are stinking, the redbuds dressed in their deep purples and bright pinks and you cannot turn your head these days without seeing a robin, their fat orange chests stuck up in the sky as if to say – here I am – spring can start now. Life is happening all around us. And so is resurrection. This is the Good News in which we stand, that all the powers of oppression and hate cannot defeat the God who says “yes” to Jesus on Easter morning in the most unexpected and fantastic way imaginable. It is enough to stun us into silence.

What is remarkable about this moment that Mark captures is that we know the women didn’t stay silent. In fact, without women, there would be no pulpits at all for them to be kept out of by the church that wouldn’t exist, either. We know they spoke, and spoke loudly, and that Peter probably mansplained to them what they actually saw. We know that the story continued. That’s why we’re here. Sure maybe some of it is obligation, or habit, but I really would like to think that it’s because deep down, in the places we don’t let ourselves talk about nearly enough, we also have a dream, something transcendent that helps us through the challenges and suffering in life. We need that empty tomb.

The root for word “tomb” in Greek is the same as the word for memory – neumeon. It’s where we get mnemonic device, a technique for helping us remember things. So when the women arrive at the tomb what they literally ask is, “Who will roll away the stone from the door of our memories?” And when they are greeted by this “young man”, kind of a code for some angelic being, he says, “Remember what Jesus told you – He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

Living as Easter people means that we live remembering what Jesus has told us, which stands in great contrast to what the world teaches. And though we may be no more likely than the disciples to remember, or to follow, that doesn’t mean that we don’t continue to remind ourselves. So, on Easter, as we claim again that he is risen, let us also remember that Jesus taught us:

• Our greatest command is to love God with all our heart, mind and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
• Greatness in God’s kin-dom is measured in humility and generosity.
• Money and power are inherently dangerous, they can get in the way of connection to God and to other people.
• And maybe the most important thing to remember after the cross – violence is not God’s answer to sin, nor was Jesus a sacrifice to appease an angry God – that God is not the Father that Jesus taught us about.

He is risen. And we are meant to be Easter people, living out these memories, in the spirit of resurrection, continuing the story of the Gospel, picking up right at the end of that dropped sentence, practicing the kin-dom right here and now in the ways that we live, working to structure our lives together in ways that reflect kin-dom life.
I dare say that’s why we’re here this morning, to hear the stories once again and to reinforce our faith with rituals, like coming to this table, where everyone is welcome and all are fed, without cost and without exception – a model for how we might think of shaping the world outside. This is our spiritual gym, a place we condition our souls for the work outside this place – protecting the environment, caring for the poor, forgiving often, rejecting racism, fighting for the powerless, sharing earthly and spiritual resources, embracing diversity, loving God and enjoying this life.

All ways in our time and place to live resurrection, as Easter people.

Christ is risen. Thanks be to God.

Palm Sunday

Mark 11.1-11

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

You know this a demonstration, right? This account of Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey? It’s a protest, a rally, a dramatic dissent aimed right at the power of his time, organized by a few young adults, seemingly without power, dismissed by the authorities, sick of the way things are and ready for a change. I don’t know how many of you went yesterday to the March For Our Lives, not only here in Tulsa but all across the country and even the world, but it bore so many things in common with this Palm Sunday parade that I’m surprised I didn’t see someone on a burro. And even heard from some online accounts that at many demonstrations, church groups carried palm branches, all too aware of the symbolism.

This is the right way to start off Holy Week, which tells the story of the final days of Jesus…or at least what Rome thought was the final days of Jesus. It’s a story of protest to be sure, a protest fueled initially by outrage, but a protest that stems from the same things that happened on the first Palm Sunday – the arrival of a new paradigm, a fresh lens with which to see, the ushering in of a new world. This new kin-dom is still here and not here, still coming to fruition, not flourishing in a giant wave, but popping up in fits and starts, like the new shoots of a crepe myrtle that the gardeners are trying to get rid of, but can’t. How do we hear this story once again? Like Christmas, it is an annual challenge to make the story new again, not to mention finding ways to present an entire Holy Week for those who can’t make it to a Maundy Thursday service, nor to Good Friday. This is not a criticism of you, this is a busy time of year. Somehow we need to hear the whole story of Holy Week – because it’s not just a journey from mountaintop to mountaintop, not a parade followed by the glory of Easter…in between the life and resurrection there is despair, there is destruction and devastation, there is death. Without that part, we might think that God is only present in our prosperity, not in the darkness and the doubt…we might think that the parade is the point, when it is really the challenging work that comes afterwards.

So today we begin with the parade, with the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem like a coronation satirizing a parade that takes place at the main gates of the city with the coronation of Pontius Pilate lead by a garrison of Roman soldiers who come each year to Jerusalem for the high holy days of Passover – to make sure the Roman subjects, these Judeans, don’t get too celebratory, or get all hyped up on this God thing and forget who’s really in charge. Pilate arrives with military force , banners and flags, royal cloth and golden chariots – a show of Roman power. Jesus arrives on a borrowed donkey with palm leaves taken from the trees around them to decorate his journey in – a show of solidarity and a very different kind of power.

The tradition says that these parades occurred at the same time on different sides of the city. That is certainly possible. But I like to think that they took place at the same time, through the same gate, the donkey next to the war horses, the children dancing around the soldier’s feet, the crowds intermingled and indistinguishable. Palm Sunday does present us with two choices – will we attend the parade of empire, complete with military might and the marks of wealth and power that empire always portrays? Or will we go to the parade of Jesus, amongst the outcast and uncounted, delivering a whole different idea of power? But what is intriguing to me now is that we are far more likely to discover that these parades are not so neatly divided…they are intertwined, weaving in and out of each other in a way that is disturbingly confusing.

This complicated by the attitude of the people following Jesus. They shout, “Hosanna – here is the Messiah!” But they do not know what they are saying. They expect, like we still expect, a hero riding into town with a red cape to save the day. They expect good to defeat evil with a single, mighty blast, or that power has come as the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun – a good guy with a gun. Only Jesus doesn’t have a gun. And he teaches that those who live by the sword, or the gun, will die by the sword, or the gun. When he is asked to show his power as the “Son of God”, he gives it away.

We still don’t appreciate the implications of that, either, for in the centuries since this parade, right up to today, we have been trying to make Jesus into Superman, with muscles and invulnerability, the conquering force of all conquering forces, not a rejection of war, but rather the ultimate warrior.

I believe that Jesus knew how people would see him, and how they would take this title “messiah.” They would misunderstand completely, trying to make him into the next great king, in the mold of David, here to overthrow the Romans with armed force and setup a new kingdom on the earth. But his is not a kingdom, it is the kin-dom, and it is already here he teaches us. We just can’t see it, or maybe we won’t see it. It takes new eyes.

The apostle Paul, one of the first writers of the Jesus movement, wrote that we human beings see, “through a glass but dimly.” We get partials, portions of the truth, often distorted and blurry, and we too often think that we have arrived at the finality. Sometimes our most well-intentioned things, driven by partial truths, cause great suffering and chaos in the long run. The reality of Holy Week asks us to move from a paradigm where we seek and are governed by certainty to a paradigm of trust. Holy Week asks us to consider the difficult and confidence-resisting questions, like – what is Easter without Judas? How do look to Jesus as our model of trust and yet hear his words from the cross – My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Without darkness, what is light?

As we head into Holy Week and the stories are told again with their familiar plots and wrote characters, there is space for us to hear that the great joy of Easter morning is born from the deepest betrayal and darkness. There is space for us to hear that God works in the gray areas, moving with us, improvising as we change directions and make decisions, some of which we think are so good at the time, some of which aren’t good to begin with…there God moves and molds and re-calibrates, seeking to let some light shine through. It is what happens when we move past the parade, and step into the work of solidarity and advocacy, which is difficult and gray and messy. That is where we encounter the God who makes all things new…though rarely in the ways we expect. I believe that this is what these young people who are leading the way on issues like gun control are going to find…complexity, doubt, paradox, conflict and, if they stay past the march, epiphany, hope, trust, life.

This week is not mean to be all parades and chocolate eggs. You are mean to hear about last meals and snuffed candles, to listen to the sound of dirges and minor keys, with blood, sweat, tears and the hammering of nails. This week ends with a tomb shut tightly and the death of a dream. It comes with mourning and heavy grief, and that is part of Easter. In fact, it’s critical to Easter, for Holy Week models for us a dedication to the refrain of life, death and resurrection that lies at the heart of Christianity. We learn, through this story being told again and again, not to expect life to last forever, to know that we cannot have new life without death and to expect, indeed to plan on, resurrection.

That is what we are seeing, by the way. You can call them marches, or dismiss them as the idle demonstrations of young people who just don’t know any better. You can think they don’t make any difference, like an itinerant rabbi with a small following leading a parade of nobodies on a donkey. But they are resurrection…after life and death, they are resurrection. Black Lives Matter, the “metoo” movement, the force of young people saying, “Enough”, these are all protest parades, pushing past the numbing agent of “thoughts and prayers” to bold action, announcing with “hosanna-like” intensity a new vision for the world. These movements say in a loud voice that the life of patriarchy, racism and the idolization of violence has had it’s day, we are living through it’s death now, and, though it’s been a long time coming, something new will be raised.

It will soon be Easter, and the tomb will be empty and then what?

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Jeremiah 31:31-34 & John 12:20-26

I have been wondering the entire time I have been working on this sermon series how I was going to fit the seven “social sins” from Gandhi’s list into six weeks of Lent. And then, just last week, I decided I wanted to do something different for Palm Sunday, so now I have to fit seven into five weeks. And that means we do the last three today. So, I hope you’re comfortable…

Or really, I hope that you are uncomfortable.

Would you pray with me? God of love and agitation, bless this time together. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts bring us closer to you, the ground of our being. Amen.

One of the common characteristics in all of the “social sins” that we have been covering this Lent, a list generated by none other than Gandhi, is that we all participate in them. That’s the way the seven “deadly” sins from Christian tradition are too, of course – we all participate in them as well. Gandhi’s list is –

Politics without Principle
Wealth Without Work
Pleasure Without Conscience
Knowledge without Character
Commerce without Morality
Science without Humanity
Worship without Sacrifice

I have engaged in all of these, or at least sought them out, and I’ll bet you have, too. Have you played the lottery? Wealth without work. Have you ever made a decision based solely on “what’s in it for me?” Pleasure without conscience. Do any of us who have money in the stock market, which includes this church, really know if it is all being used justly? Commerce without morality.

I say this not for the purpose of shaming, but for the purpose of solidarity. We all ought to know that when we call out sin, every one of us is involved. Not in the same way, not to the same degree, but we are all, as the late Billy Graham would have said, sinners. And I don’t know about you, but that makes me uncomfortable. And perhaps we don’t get enough of this kind of discomfort in religion, not the kind that shames, but the kind that reminds us that, “there but for the grace of God go I.” When we look to scripture, there’s plenty in there about transformation, about repentance, about revelation. Things hidden that are revealed, ways that we all fall short, opportunities to change, to grow to accept our own shortcomings and reach for something better. The language of the Bible is often about decidedly uncomfortable things, as if spiritual practice actually requires an intervention of sorts, an opening of the closet doors, the unpacking of the attic, the spring cleaning of our souls.

But that means the kind of work we don’t like, moving the furniture and dusting the high places, cleaning the baseboards and changing the air filters. Our faith practices rarely get this real, acting instead like a soft cushion to most, empowering our own proclivities and prejudices with the approval of a God who looks far too much like us. Yet the prophets in scripture tell us of a God who comes as a cleansing fire, a God whose intent is to “dig up and pull down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring harm”, in that no-pain, no-gain sort of way. A God who comes to work the muscles of our souls, causing some of us a lot of sore aching and others a pull or a tear, requiring some treatment, some rehab. Christianity, or the genuine practice of any spiritual endeavor, is not for the faint of heart, and it means that we must be willing to lift up the rugs and clean under the bed.

The section of Jeremiah read this morning comes as part of a great judgment that the prophet announces, despite the sort-of comforting language of “I Shall be their God and they shall be my people.” It points out all the bad stuff, with scary language and loads of public chastisement, calling out injustice, claiming, with the terminology of infidelity, that the people have cheated on God. Then Jeremiah seeks the will of the people to recognize such sin in their midst and to turn from it towards a God who seeks to be their benefactor. Now, I’m not sure I buy this whole model of God, and the judgmental part disturbs me as much as I imagine it disturbs you. Yet I appreciate the sentiment because we are alive in such a time as well. As Lutheran pastor and author Nadia Bolz-Weber says in a brilliant op-ed in the Washington Post:

In Greek, the word apocalypse means to uncover, to peel away, to show what’s underneath.

That’s what this country has been experiencing in the past six months.

There has not been a sudden uptick in sexual misconduct and assault in our country,

the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements are simply exposing what was already there.

Add to that the awareness of the ravages of a culture of violence on our society, including guns, the death penalty and a criminal justice system that seeks punishment over all else…attacks on a social safety net that has been steadily degraded over the past decade and, here in our state as well as others, an effort to make the most basic of arguments in support of public education that has reached an almost unimaginable level – the shutting down of schools because we cannot agree that schools are critical. The veil has been lifted and no amount of platitudes, promises or “thoughts and prayers” can put the lid back on – the time is not just coming. The time is now.

If this is uncomfortable language to you, it should be. These are uncomfortable times because they reveal to us what is at our core, and the core seems unbearably rotten. Again, Rev. Bolz-Weber:

When the subordination of women is established as God’s will, when slavery is established as God’s will, when discrimination against queer folks is established as God’s will, when the CEO of the National Rifle Association claims the right to buy a semiautomatic assault rifle is “not bestowed by man, but granted by God,” it delivers a poison that can infect the deepest parts of us.

Because messages that are transmitted to us in God’s name embed far beneath the surface,

all the way down to our original place, our createdness, our source code.

This is the trouble with sin, no matter the categories, no matter if it is social or deadly or otherwise. It infects us all, living inside us even if we don’t know how we caught the virus. I did not grow up in a fundamentalist household, nor did I attend a church that programmed me with the subjugation of women or the hatred of gay people. But I do live in Oklahoma, where we push legislation each and every session to do just that, where the theology of privilege and hierarchy dominate the landscape, where poverty is equated with moral failure and where a Gospel of love and compassion seems drowned out by the weak gospel of personal salvation and plastic righteousness. I too bear witness to a narrow faith. I have never belonged to a church with a female senior minister, nor, until I became a pastor, belonged to a church with a person of color on staff. I have heard the words echo in my own head – well, why don’t they just get a job? And, as the Lenten class on Wednesday nights is teaching us, I have engaged in racist acts that I did not know were racist, because racism so often masquerades as “normalcy”, that’s how infected we all are. I am infected, too.

The list of social sins we have been covering for Lent is just like the list of personal sins from the so-called seven deadlies that our tradition leaves us…they aren’t any good if we simply aim them at other people. We have to know that they live in us. We have to know that they are woven into this thing we call life, infused at a cellular level into our beings. Then, and this is the tricky part, we have to be willing to set them aside, including the assumptions that come with them, the paradigms that are so “normal” to us that we don’t even see them, and be willing to have them die.

In the passage from John, some Greeks come to the disciples…by Greeks we ought to read “foreigners” or “pagans” or the “not to be trusted.” They want to see Jesus. Note that they don’t ask about a new member’s class, nor do they want to sit down for coffee with the pastor or learn about the programming for their kids. They want to see Jesus, face-to-face. And Jesus responds with a finger pointed right in the direction of the cross. Upon hearing the request to “see him”, Jesus asks that they be drawn more deeply into the kin-dom of God. He tells them they must plant themselves, and be tended to by the God of whom Jeremiah speaks – a God who watches over them to build and to plant. He offers his life as example, a life of love for, service to, and sacrifice on behalf of the neighbor, those all around us. A life that demonstrates God’s strength through vulnerability, God’s power through what appears as weakness in the eyes of the world, and God’s justice through love, mercy and forgiveness. And he calls those who would follow him, all of us, to the very same kind of life and love, and to the death that accompanies it – the death of status quo, the death of our forgetfulness as to how we are created and for what purpose we are created, the death of our sin. This is no metaphor, but a death that is very real. Think about the ways that teenagers are being shouted down as they make a simple claim for their safety, or how women who finally voice their mistreatment get dragged through the mud. Think of how stubbornly legislation continues to hammer away at poor people, and how the lie of “might makes right” continues to be propagated, even by people calling it peace. Think of how quickly the angry reaction to #BlackLivesMatter came, despite overwhelming evidence that people of color are treated differently by our systems of justice. Now, if that doesn’t make you uncomfortable, I don’t know what will.

May God bless us in our discomfort. May God stretch our love so that we might offer mercy and forgiveness to a world dead-set against them. May we know that what it means to follow Jesus is to live life, death and resurrection over and over again, seeking life beyond this age, beyond our limited understanding of what success or fulfillment is and trusting in the God who attaches our souls to eternity. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Numbers 21:4-9 & John 3:14-21

This has been a long week. Monday brought a trip with colleagues and friends to Oklahoma City for the annual Muslim Day at the Capitol, where we once again stood as the interfaith community to welcome Oklahoma Muslims to their capitol building, as a counter to the people who always show up to try and yell at them that America is for Americans, and that means certain people, with certain looks, certain skin tone and certain faith expressions. Good news? We outnumbered them about 10-1. And many of us had time, including some of our Muslim friends, to engage in a little intersectional work, talking with legislators about a cruel bill that would further penalize the LGBTQ community, ostracizing would-be parents and the kids needing families in the foster care system. One of those bills is dead…another needs some work.

Tuesday was a panel discussion with the Sierra Club to talk about environmental justice, and the ties between pollution and racism, exploitation of resources and disenfranchisement. It was a more politically diverse crowd than you might imagine as leaders and community members begin to see the impact of climate change and realize that “business as usual” can’t be the call of the 21^st century.

Wednesday – back at the Capitol with The Interfaith Alliance of Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma Conference of Churches and Tulsa Metropolitan Ministry holding a press conference in opposition to adjustments to a house chaplaincy program that seem to be based on a desire to make the opening prayer in the House more of an echo chamber than a representation of the people. Or maybe it’s just a deliberate move to make sure that the House never hears from a liberal female preacher (or maybe just a female preacher at all) calling them out with scripture…or, heaven forbid, an Imam praying at them with a reminder that God doesn’t quite fit in the box in which they think they have God carefully contained.

Thursday started the initial joy of a bond approved for an undocumented woman who has been held at the county jail on an ICE hold for a month, her mental and physical health deteriorating rapidly. But then the complications, and the cost, of a federal bond process. And then the little network that we are slowly building here responding in kind with accompaniment, finances and motivation to help this woman get freed so she can at least worry about her future with her family, at home.

And all of this overshadowed, believe it or not, with a rollercoaster ride of organization and outrage as teachers all across this state demand that their union finally lead on the decade long decline in school funding and teacher salaries. I stood at the school board meeting as the superintendent and a union officer made a public declaration in support of a plan to strike. I held phone call after phone call with various leaders, teachers and parents, in an effort to encourage the union to be more aggressive and we hosted a meeting here Wednesday night that was a planned vote of 200+ local teachers to stand apart from their union and go their own way. But the union listened, changed their announced date for the strike and started showing the same frustration and anger that the people they are supposed to be representing are showing. So, instead of 200, we had about 45, and good discussion about next steps.

Oh yeah, and about a dozen of you gathered in the fellowship hall Wednesday night, under the able facilitation of Rev. Nancy Eggen, to continue the White Privilege curriculum, learning about how we might change a world that we didn’t necessarily make, but which needs us in order to change.

And all of that brings me to this passage from John, setup by the passage from Numbers. For one of the things that all of these issues from the past week have in common is theology. It drives those issues because theology shapes our character, which, in turn, shapes our ideology. And whether it is prayer or racism, the care of the planet or the responsibility towards the stranger, the orphan, the marginalized, the theology that drives us is fed by our character. For who we think God is and what we think God is up to in the world matters.

This passage from chapter 3 of John’s gospel contains verse 16 – perhaps one of the most famous, and maybe infamous, passages in the New Testament. It has been quoted and re-quoted, present at most sporting events in bright sharpie on a poster board held by someone whose theology most likely has them believing that is the best thing one could do as a Christian. But, as Gandhi reminds us in his “seven social sins” we are covering during this Lenten sermon series, a little knowledge without character is deadly, just as one line, out of context, can be very misleading.

We usually hear John 3:16 alone, and therefore miss the larger story. For John 3:16 is a call to us, set in the framework of John’s whole story about Jesus. It is a response to a man named Nicodemus, who is a Pharisee, and a leader used to privilege and entitlement who seemingly cannot understand a God who works like Jesus claims, nor a God whose love is so strong that one can be born anew in it’s glow. And Jesus knows he needs to hear that God loves the world. The disciples do too, which is why in the very next chapter Jesus then takes them to the world, to a small town in Samaria, on the other side of their borders, so that they can meet who the world is. Because the world, Jesus will teach us with his love, may very well be the last place on earth we think God would love.

Of course, it is more complicated than just reading a single passage out of context. When people read, or are taught, that John 3:16 is about the sacrifice of a man by God to show us how much God loves us, there are theological assumptions behind it – a character of Christianity, if you will. This is why character matters when we discuss knowledge. What we do with knowledge, what we even think knowledge is, gets shaped by our character. If you read scripture looking for a judgmental God whose vengeance waits for all us sinners and a Jesus whose bloody death is the only thing that could expiate God’s wrath, you can find it. I promise. And then you can read verse 16 as a summons to exclude those we think God does not love rather than an invitation to participate in spreading God’s vast and amazing love. And if you look in scripture for a God whose love is so deep and wide that nothing can separate us from it, not death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell – well, you can find that, too. And then you can read this verse as one of welcome and grace.

When John makes reference to the passage from Numbers, claiming Jesus needs to be raised up like the snake, we hear the familiar refrain – For God SO loved the world – which we assume, of course, is an indication of degree. God loved the world this much, which is why God gives God’s son. We get that assumption from the translation of the Greek word outos into King James English. However, in the English of that time, “so” also meant in this manner. This, coupled with the way the Greek word is used elsewhere allows many translations to interpret the passage this way: God loved the world this way. Now, let’s look at Numbers 21. Rev. Carl Gregg puts it this way:

“…the Israelites are wandering in the wilderness following the Exodus from Egypt. And they are growing impatient with year after year of hiking around the Sinai Peninsula. They don’t like the food and there’s not enough water. And in one of those classic Hebrew Bible moments, God responds to their complaints by sending “poisonous serpents among the people.” It’s kind of like treating a broken arm by smashing the patient’s toe with a hammer. Your arm may not feel better, but you’re too busy screaming about your toe to complain about your arm.”

But the people stop complaining and start looking to God to stop the snakes. In response, God tells Moses to make a bronze serpent and put it on a pole, to raise it up and let it heal the people by reminding them to trust in God. This is the symbolism that John evokes here, saying that Jesus being raised on the cross is meant to remind us to trust in God…so that when we look at him “raised up”, maybe on a cross, maybe on Easter, we can be healed from the anxiety of the ways of death and hate. What has happened, however, is that John 3:16 has become a slogan, a gimmick designed to grant entry – read the verse, say the Jesus prayer, get some water on you and you’re done. Now get on with your life and know that all the things you hate and all the things you love are now sanctioned by a God who sits way up on a pole, stoic and bronzed.

That idol must be broken. It must be shattered into pieces so that we might find the living God who would reside in our hearts, asking us to become more compassionate, to seek justice and spread hope and to find the mark of our faith not in a marketing scheme or a well-formulated set of judgments we always aim at other people, but in our efforts to be born anew to the manner in which God uses love. As we encounter new stresses, new suffering and concern we should not be seeing the wrath of God visited upon us for misdeeds, but rather be asking – where is God in all of this? How can I be part of God’s mission? Where can I sow God’s love?

These are the theological challenges of the 21^st century. The world is changing and while God is eternal, our theology is not. God is still speaking – are we still listening? And this kind of challenge requires more than a simple slogan or glib nod to a religious membership…it requires a practice of faith. So, if you know that this change needs to happen, and you still need some kind of touchstone passage to use, then I suggest you set John 3:16 aside – too much baggage. Might I suggest instead Micah – “God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does God require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Or, perhaps look to the knowledge Jesus passes on, read with the character he teaches us – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” It is not enough to say that salvation comes from doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God, from loving God and neighbor. It’s not enough just to know this. We must live in such a manner everyday, especially when no one is looking.

May we learn to love the world in this way— as God so loves the world. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Exodus 20:1-17 & John 2:13-16

We are currently reading through Exodus in the Bible Study class – which, with a shameless plug, meets just before this service at 9:30 if you’re interested. And in that study we are talking a lot about how this particular piece of scripture becomes a profound account of liberation for not only the Jewish peoples in many places and moments of history, but also for others. There was, in our own country for a period of time, a “slave’s Bible” that was published by slaveholders specifically to be given to those in chains across this nation. It was virtually identical to the Bible we have right here in our pews save one major omission – no Book of Exodus. References to liberation, or slaves being set free or equality from other places in the Bible were removed too, but this entire book was eliminated! This is, in part, because the whole of Exodus is a story about both literal liberation and metaphorical liberation. Far beyond a single line or passage, the narrative itself is about God’s mighty hand coming to save people from tyranny and oppression. That is powerful stuff if you are oppressed, and dangerous stuff if you are the oppressor.

What we heard read this morning from Exodus is the ten commandments, or, in Hebrew and Greek, the “ten sayings” or “ten words.” We most often hear of them taken out of context or, here in Oklahoma, carved into a stone, which is a violation of the first commandment if you think about it. Yet they are really part of a much larger narrative, and part of a much larger set of commands, the “boundaries” of this newly liberated community, who are wandering the wilderness and learning that with freedom comes responsibility. We should not pull the “Ten Commandments” out of this context. They are and should be read as part of this story of covenant. God’s liberation makes demands on us.

According to Exodus, God sets free the Hebrews in order to mold a people who are truly free from slavery, not just free from the chains, and able to undertake the responsibilities of life in community with God and one another. And that takes a moral code. Hence, the ten…or rather the 365 commandments. We can have our disagreements with some of these laws, we probably find some abhorrent. They even contradict one another at times, but this is to be expected when human beings are in charge of interpreting and disseminating the will of God. If there is one thing that the Bible bears witness to, it is that we human beings can take a perfectly good and simple rule like, “Love your neighbor as yourself”, and muck it up completely. Well, who is my neighbor, really? And what do you mean by love? And what if I don’t love myself very much, are we talking about an equation here – so if I don’t like myself then I’m free to pass that on to others?

Throughout the Bible, from Exodus to Deuteronomy to the Psalms and Prophets all the way through to the Gospel writers and the letters of Paul we see this directive lived out, whether a call to respond to freedom from the chains of the Egyptian empire or freedom from the chains of the Roman empire or all the way through history to the American empire in which we live now. For what is the kin-dom if not an effort to free us from the mindset empire creates in us and the ways that it twists our morality and calls it “the way it is.” The kin-dom model sets us against that with a far-reaching ethic and a moral code that is supposed to accompany us everywhere. Note that the instructions in Exodus, even after these first ten, address things like property and commerce and justice, authorizing an ethic that, while still endorsing slavery and seeing women as property, in context is a push towards a more universal human rights, to a compassionate and human ethic that works on us still, beckoning us to give up our power, to expand our horizons and to draw the circle wider.

Today our language is less tribal and more economic. And, like the Israelites in the wilderness who almost immediately after the tablets are handed down from Mt. Sinai ignore their directives, so too we forget that God’s grace is only truly accepted by us when we can give it away to others. We forget that all of the desires we have, our needs and wants and hopes, are the ones that others have, too. While God offers us abundance, the empire teaches us scarcity and insists on models of competition to justify hoarding, rationalization and control. This is amplified by a capitalist system, where we often treat one another as commodities, as if people were just cogs in a machine and to the victor goes the spoils.

After the collapse of Enron, a Wal-Mart that consistently rakes in billions and keeps employees eligible for food stamps, and the almost total devastation of the economy from an out of control banking industry, “business ethics” seems to be an oxymoron, like “military intelligence” or “jumbo shrimp.” And yet we continue to insist that we can have morality in a “winner takes all” atmosphere…we persist in our assertion that greed can create positive outcomes, or that a “free-market” governed entirely by what the market will bear can possibly be relied upon to care about the people it impacts.

Over the past few decades, we have learned what happens when a capitalist system is deregulated and the boundaries that seek to curtail and protect are abandoned in favor of so-called “free-market” principles. Benefits and salaries of employees are cut while profit margins and CEO perks skyrocket. There is a mad rush for the cheapest labor possible, creating sweat shops overseas, or the migrant farm workers in the US who are thoroughly exploited while expensive lobbyists for the same companies help shape an immigration system that cooperates with the exploitation. Time and time again, the business “ethic” in the United States confirms that people don’t matter, profits do. Nowhere is that twisted ideology more apparent than in a private prison system that makes so-called “justice” a for-profit model, or a privatized school system that believes the education of our children can be monetized.

We do have examples, of course, of positive ethical practices. Yet they are the exception, not the norm. Taking care of your employees, setting a fair and balanced work environment, noticing and caring for the ecosystems in which your business operates…in a world governed by kin-dom ethics, this would be considered the standard, the bare minimum, not the exception.

We continue today through a sermon series, inspired by the seven social sins identified by Mahatmas Gandhi almost a century ago. It is remarkable how his list still rings true. The sins he listed were corporate rather than an individualized list like the seven deadly sins, and they are: Wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, religion without sacrifice, and politics without principle. Today we are using the Ten Commandments and the example of Jesus cleaning out the temple’s market to examine commerce without morality. But rather than continue to list the ways that we know that commerce and morality are strangers to each other, there is a chance for us to discover how it is that the Gospel asks us to re-examine the way that we live as a whole. Morality in commerce ought to come from someplace, as a sign of our acceptance of the Gospel rather than a wooden adherence to a bunch of rules we have to make for every conceivable situation. What Jesus demonstrates isn’t merely anger about people transacting business near the temple, it is anger at turning religious practice into another commodity. His anger is about the identity of commerce overtaking the people’s identity as children of God. For the money changers were placing profit over people, making access to God contingent on your bank account and acting like they were being observant. This is ultimately what has the rabbis condense the Ten Commandments to a shorter directive – the great Shema said on Shabbat evening to this day – love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, mind and strength. Because the more you list what that means out, the more that people treat it like a business contract, looking for loopholes and ways to exploit it. But these laws from Exodus and the ways of the kin-dom that Jesus teaches are covenental, the are about right relationships, not the appearance of piety. They are meant to teach us that we need each other, not that it’s us versus them.

We still live here in the heart of the American empire. So, of course we will act as consumers and citizens, for this is part of who we are. But I believe that our identity as children of God, our responsibility to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, must take priority over any of the demands made on us by the state or by any economic system, by any other ideology or by any of the “-isms” laid upon us….none of them eclipse the identity we have at this table, for here you eat without cost or fee. Here you are welcomed no matter what your nationality, your status, no matter who you are or will become. The table is open to all who would come…free for those who are free, or those who would be free, which is how God created us all…

Come to the table.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Mark 8:31-38

Is it possible to participate in Lent without giving something up? I mean does it even count? Can you just say, “Yep, I’m doing Lent”, and not forfeit anything? Now, I’ve heard of people adding things during Lent instead of giving them up, but that’s really giving something up too because you are replacing free time with prayer, Facebook with reading, the addition is really a subtraction. The passage today leaves us with these heavy words – “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

Denial, loss, taking up our cross – these are all directives that make us wince. Can we get back to the “my yoke is easy and my burden light” part, Jesus? And there’s this word that surrounds not only this season of Lent, and this passage, but the Gospel stories as a whole – sacrifice. Like repentance, sacrifice is a word that we don’t like very much in the so-called “progressive” church. Sacrifice kind of rubs against our incarnational theology – the kind that says we are children of God, beloved by God and accepted by God. Sacrifice – denying ourselves – doesn’t seem, at least on the surface, to fit with that. Plus, the idea of sacrifice has been used against us so much, to keep women “in their place”, to make children “obedient” and to help men…well, OK, it doesn’t get used much for the men in the typical religious scenario, though I’m sure they will tell you that being in charge of everything is a great burden. Still, sacrifice, like repentance, has been weaponized.

Yet sacrifice and self-denial also feature heavily in the work of the mystics and the wisdom of the monastics, who seem to understand the difference between something unhealthy like self-abuse and the spiritually rewarding work of resistance, especially to our own proclivities. So they would fast, and pray and participate in individual and group worship that was dedicated to renewal and an encounter with the Holy. The idea behind this kind of sacrificial practice is not that we become someone else or that we conform to some set idea of an ideal human being; rather it is centered in the acceptance that God is with us and working on us, creating us to be more authentic to who we truly are, a more genuine version of who God created us to be.

What these terms repentance and sacrifice assert is that we mask this reality. We aren’t who God created us to be. We are instead what “America” created us to be, or our family or our tribe or label — whatever narrower system we either believe, or are told, grants us identity. Repentance calls on us to notice this, even to confess it, and to turn around, which is what that word literally means. And sacrifice is the tool that helps us notice our “selves” – or the difference between our self and the identity we portray to the world. Fasting helps us know that we are not defined only by our food, or our bodies, or our media, or whatever it is from which we fast. Prayer helps us be centered on something other than entertainment or distraction, and it allows us to seek help, which is an unrewarded virtue in our non-religious lives. Taking time to stop, to reflect, to seek new information, to redefine ourselves in the process and to learn to grant others the benefit of the doubt is not only a strange experience, it is downright subversive.

And this is the point, after all…to transform ourselves. But this is hard to accept. Even as Jesus lays out the road ahead, full of confrontation, suffering, rejection, death and resurrection, it is Peter, the “rock of the church”, who pulls him aside, the text says, to rebuke him. Peter rejects all of this talk of sacrifice in favor, we assume, of a much more glorious one where Jesus the messiah kicks the Romans out and sits on David’s old throne…maybe with Peter by his side. But Jesus blasts him – get away from me! You are my enemy! You are so stuck in the ways that human beings do stuff, you can’t even see how God works!

It is quite possible, of course, for us to be religious and never practice religion. It is possible to be active in a church and inactive in the Gospel. Religion can easily become a facade, something we do for show, in order to have the right sticker on our car, or show that we belong to the right club, or to claim a title while we do not engage in any of the struggle and sacrifice that the religious practices are designed to produce. We can become so in love with promoting and praising Jesus that we forget to follow him, to practice what he practiced and challenge what he challenged and, perhaps most importantly, to learn to love the way that he loved.

But that takes sacrifice. Again, by sacrifice, we’re not talking about merely succumbing to the needs of others, or martyrdom, or what modern psychology calls co-dependency. This sacrifice is a practice, it is something you choose, you take on and then set down again. It is meant to take us out of our own personal experience so that our exposure to someone or something else helps us grow when we go back to our own personal experience, which is where we really live anyway. This is the practice of religion, rather than religion for religion’s sake, for when we have religion without sacrifice, it turns hierarchical, even deadly. Religion without sacrifice loses the ability to listen, to change and to be shaped. It learns that it owns God, like any other commodity of power, and it refuses for God to get out of the box in which we have placed God. And it learns that the point of religion is defending the castle, which is not the point of religion at all. For if our religion does not make us more humble, more mistrustful of power, even our own power, then it is not religion, it is domination masked in piety.

We have seen this time and time again, of course. In our own tradition, beginning with the marriage of Christianity and the Roman Empire, the very thing it was born opposing. Then with the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem Witch trials, Manifest Destiny, the Ku Klux Klan, the Holocaust – all examples of religion not practiced but manipulated. And so, when religion gets marched out and held up as a badge of honor I am left wondering – is this the religion of plastic piety, the desire for the appearance of religion, or a genuine effort to practice religion? For I know the kind of fruit both versions produce. If we do not reflect with depth and sincerity on commands to love our neighbor as ourselves, we can develop immigration policies that are cruel and inhuman and exploit others for our own gain. If we do not actively practice the concept of grace, then we can learn to scapegoat, pinning all the blame on someone and casting them out. We can create systems of so-called justice that dehumanize people and unjustly imprison those we deem lesser by whatever means we determine their lesser status. If we do not take seriously Jesus’ warning that it gains us nothing to own the whole world and lose life in the process, then we will let greed and power and money rule the day, we will forget people in the name of profit, and justify anything if it makes money.

In contrast, is the counter-intuitive Gospel’s truth – that the more we give, the more we receive; the more we seek to be a friend, the more friends we discover; and more we love, the more we are loved….when we give our life away we save it. Is is as perplexing, challenging and ultimately important a question as any great spiritual truth. We know this, I am sure. But we forget. And what’s more, we are encouraged to not believe it. We can live our whole lives practicing these preposterous ideas and still have work to do, for this is the point of religious practice – we sacrifice for our own growth. Yes, surely such sacrifice should also help others, through charity, advocacy, and solidarity, but that is, finally, a step in our own wholeness. This is not selfish, it’s obedience…obedience to the teacher who taught with his own life that we can trust God with such foolishness as a covenant that says if we just love, God will handle the judging and if we will hope that even the cloudiest of days, even weeks full of grey and rain, will give way to the bright sunshine – just like yesterday afternoon as people gathered in downtown Tulsa to speak against an unjust immigration system and to stand in solidarity with students and workers, families and children for a better tomorrow for all people.

When Jesus says that any who want to follow him must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow, he does not say this to only the disciples, as many of his more difficult statements go. He says it to the crowd and the disciples, making it clear, at least in Mark’s telling, that this message is for all of us. And it sounds so hard. I don’t want a cross, Jesus. I’ve seen The Passion of the Christ – yuck! No, thank you. But pronouns matter. Jesus doesn’t ask us to take up his cross, but rather our cross. It’s not the same thing. We aren’t supposed to be Jesus, that part is already taken, we are supposed to follow Jesus with our spiritual practices, with a theological critique of the world around us and by practicing sacrificial love in the world. Maybe this means you stop to help someone in need, maybe it’s a donation to One Great Hour of Sharing, maybe it is in standing up for someone, or standing in solidarity. And maybe it is found in the simple act of listening to someone, and sharing a smile or hug. Or maybe it comes by fasting this week, skipping a meal and replacing it with prayer, or fasting from technology for a night to help you remember what is important and what is not. It can even be found in seeing such sacrificial love in someone else and making sure to thank them for their witness. Such practices, I will absolutely confess, are not world-changing, but they are YOU-changing. And that’s how the world changes. That’s how we recognize the kin-dom that is already here. One sacrifice at a time.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Mark 1:9-15

Lent comes to us wrapped in this story of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, a story full of baptism and blessing, temptation, the voice of God, the arrest of the man who baptized him and the announcement of the good news. So, in other words, Lent is complicated. The practice is far more elaborate than giving up chocolate or wearing black a lot, it is specifically spiritual work meant to engage in us reflection on our own hearts and souls. So, rather than just arbitrarily giving something up, the real struggle is to sacrifice for something and to grow a little in the process.

There is an old morality story about a grandfather teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is rage, envy, greed, arrogance, lies, resentment, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, generosity, truth and compassion. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The grandfather replied, “The one you feed.”

This is a familiar story to many of us, and it is also what Lent is about. It is about the paths we choose, the things we consume, not just the things we ingest, the wolf that we feed. Lent is meant to be a time of repentance, though we have abused that word almost out of all helpfulness, and like so many rituals and guidelines of religious practice we have made the laws the point instead of allowing them to help shape us. And so in the so-called “progressive” church we often either dismiss Lent altogether – too Catholic – or we engage with it at arms length, giving up a token something half-heartedly. And we miss, I’m afraid, a chance to engage in something that might really be life-changing, transformative, even, dare I say it, spiritually enriching.

Giving something up is not the point, nor is Lent about the romanticization of suffering – anyone who tries to romanticize such things has never suffered. Rather it is about discovering how we can heal and renew and grow despite our sufferings, even despite our sins. You will hear the word “sin” a lot during the liturgy and hymns of Lent, but I think that I’d better be very clear about what that means, for many of us have been beat over our heads with the word sin and yet still find ourselves needing a good theology of sin. Sin, from the Greek word, hamartia, is an archery term meaning to miss the mark. During Lent we speak of sin because this is a time of reflection, a time for us to look at ourselves and wonder where have we missed the mark. This, of course, means we have to know what the mark is that we have missed. And this works best when we do such work for ourselves rather than only use our honed sin-seeking skills to point out to someone else where they have missed the mark. That’s called judgment…and it’s one of those marks we’re not supposed to miss.

In 590 CE, Pope Gregory I unveiled a list of the so-called “Seven Deadly Sins” – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Today one could make an argument that these are the celebrated values of the United States, rather than a list of things to be avoided. Anymore, this list comes across as an oversimplified, legalistic “no” list, that lends itself too easily to being used as a weapon against others rather than a tool for self-reflection and improvement. And because we have isolated sins to only the personal realm, this list also has no comment for the many ways that we sin corporately, in the systems we create and the choices we make collectively.

So this Lent instead of speaking only individually, let’s look to one of the saints of the 20th Century – Mahatma Gandhi – and a move from individual sin to the idea of the sins we share together. On October 22, 1925, Gandhi published a list he called the “Seven Social Sins” in his weekly newspaper Young India. It is a more complex idea about sin, which it does not confine to single actions, but characterizes as actions done a certain way. Pride, on Pope Gregory’s list, may be sinful if it makes us arrogant and rude, but it may be quite virtuous when, for instance, it creates a weekend that helps marginalized people feel better about who they are. Gandhi’s list has seven entries, and my plan for Lent is to cover one a week, with two combined on a particular week because there’s only 6 weeks of Lent. The list of social sins is:

Politics without Principle
Wealth Without Work
Pleasure Without Conscience
Knowledge without Character
Commerce without Morality
Science without Humanity
Worship without Sacrifice

Today, after the week that has just transpired, we cover politics without principle. Now, we all know that there’s not a politician out there who won’t claim principles. But principles are like character…not shown with words but by deeds. I can almost hear right now the politicians say, but I have principles! I believe in God, guns and guts – those are principles. No, those are ideologies, and an ideology can be held by a thousand people or one person. It’s still an ideology. Principles are something broader, something more determined by “us” rather than “me.” Webster’s defines it as a “fundamental truth”, or something that serves as a foundation or a basis for a chain of reasoning, i.e. an ideology. When someone claims “God, guns and guts” as an ideology, there is a principle, or principles, behind it. Maybe those principles are that some people matter more than others, or “to the victor goes the spoils”, or might makes right. Whatever the case, they form the basis for being able to say, “God, guns and guts” and we have to ask ourselves, because I actually have a lot of faith in two of those three, what lies at the roots? For the solid principle, at least the way I see it, begins with this – either all of us count or none of us do.

Politics not guided by solid principles but instead driven the next election, or partisan victory, or personal image, are politics that aren’t helpful, ultimately, to anyone. But it also matters what principles are at play. Teamwork, loyalty and even profitability can be great principles or horrible principles, depending on context. First, as foundational to all of our principles, something must be laid. For us, as Christians, it is this – we are all created in the image of God, each of us loved and valued by the Creator. If that is your foundational principle, then it must shape teamwork with questions about who is on the team? It must impact loyalty with assertions that respect is always a two-way street. And it must direct our models of profitability with the simple reinforcement that profits cannot come at the expense of people.

This past week has brought many examples of our failing foundations, and I’m not talking about anything on that list of seven deadly sins. No, I mean the most crucial sin of all – forgetting that we are all created in the image of God and that God’s amazing grace is for all of us . Last week that was brought home to me in many different ways. I imposed ashes on the forehead of Betsy Edwards, in an ICU bed with a ventilator snaked down her throat, speaking these words – you are dust and to dust you shall return – as if I had to remind her that we are mortal. I placed those same ashes on the forehead of Richard Ward, and said those same words, telling him of the fragility of life as he mourns his youngest son. I listened to the reports coming back from Dallas, where one of the clients of the New Sanctuary Movement saw her husband, 8 months in detention already, deported back to Mexico with no goodbye, no word of where he will be dropped off, no communication with his three children –and all as she wonders if her undocumented life is next. And we all bore witness to another chapter in this continued sinful story of our nation’s idolatry of guns that is so strong we appear willing to sacrifice our children to it. Where is the principle of people? Yes, we need immigration laws, and the politics that develop them. We may even need to deport people, but we cannot lose sight that there are human beings involved in our ideological struggles and that no human being is illegal. We may be long past the point of no return on guns in our society, but there must be room made at assert that your supposed “right” to own whatever kind of gun you want cannot trump my right to reasonable safety, or the rights of our children to be as safe as possible in their own schools.

And then there are schools. For last week also brought a very difficult vote at our Capitol, in a grand display of politics that continue to talk around problems and politicians that continue to forget who it is that they are supposed to be representing. The principles matter. And politics without them become just another game of winners and losers, with power and privilege ruling the day once more. And that dynamic might be many things, but standing in the shadow of a Savior who had all the power and gave it away, it sure ain’t Christian.

The sin that I can most readily address is my own. Lent helps us to see that in ourselves, for self-justification and denial are mighty forces that often stand as adversaries to the kin-dom. So I make time to look inside, in part so I can see where it is that I am missing the mark, and, in part, so I can more readily identify the places in our world where we are missing the mark. As I’m sure the participants of last Lent’s White Privilege class will attest, once you open your eyes it is difficult not to see…once you hear the heartaches of an undocumented mother worried for her children, you cannot hear news stories the same way. Once you take the time to learn beyond the latest headlines, it is hard to trust the simple answer any longer. And once you experience complexity, then the action of scapegoating is no longer as satisfying as it once was. We should all run from Lent, you know? It is hard work to be introspective and to consider complexity and nuance, to sacrifice for our principles. While it may be true, as Socrates once wrote, that the unexamined life is not worth living, the examined life takes heart and courage and strength. So, if your guiding principle is that God loves us all – every, single other – then the world needs your voice right now. Take heart, friends – “The time is fulfilled, and the kin-dom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” And then act on it.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

2 Kings 2:1-2, 9-12 & Mark 9:2-12

It is so easy to start slamming on Peter when you hear this passage. It is one of the more comical examples of Peter not really “getting it” while he stands on a mountain bathed in a glow from Jesus and suggesting that they just throw up some tents and stay there forever. It’s a silly notion, but Peter is really just trying to honor his teacher after all. Peter surely has visions of the scene with Elijah and Elisha in his head and he’s trying to read the room and he’s such a spectacular failure that it’s almost endearing. If Jesus were a southerner, he’d just turn and say, “Oh, Peter, bless your heart.”

For Peter honoring is something that involves edifices and monuments, some pomp and circumstance and that’s why he wants the dazzling white light show to keep going. He is terrified after all, that’s what the text tells us, and he just doesn’t know what to do or say and Peter is one of those people who when he’s nervous he just starts talking. You know people like that, right? Maybe you are people like that? But the whole scene gets cut short by another visitor from the Hebrew stories…straight outta’ Exodus comes the overshadowing cloud and the disembodied voice that must be God, thought the text never says that, and that voice says – “This is my beloved, listen to him.” Actually, in Greek is says “hear him”, as in “let those who have ears, hear.”

The story continues in Mark, with Jesus explaining to them what was really going on and how they must be quiet about it, as if a plan is in play that won’t work if people know what’s going to happen…perhaps because people will react the same way they disciples do. They don’t understand, questioning, the text says, what this rising from the dead could mean. Then Jesus drops this little bit of knowledge on them – Elijah has already come and they did to him whatever they pleased, and the same is in store for me…the guy you all keep saying is the messiah. I keep having visions of Luke Skywalker making his grand reappearance in the latest Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, and saying to the camera, as much to lifelong Star Wars fans as to anyone else, “This is not going to go the way you think!”

It seems that when Peter wishes to honor Jesus on a mountaintop, he doesn’t really even know what he’s honoring. In fact, he may not even know how to honor, at least not in the way that his teacher, or the apparent voice of God, wish to impart to him. Honoring is a tricky thing, sometimes. For the voice of God seems to suggest in this story that it’s not dwellings or edifices that do it, but hearing and, by implication, doing.

We may all know the name Rosa Parks here, but how many of you know the name Claudette Colvin? Claudette Colvin was 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, when she refused to move to the back of the bus and give up her seat to a white person — nine months before Rosa Parks did the very same thing. She was one of many African-American women who participated in the bus boycott without all of the coverage that others got. And why did Claudette do this – especially at the age of 15? At her segregated school they had been studying black leaders like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and she remembers that, “My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. [And when they asked me to move on that bus…] I couldn’t get up.”

I suppose that Claudette could have been inspired by the stories of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth to advocate for a statue in the town square, or maybe in a more modern era to print some cool t-shirts or start a trending hashtag. Instead she picked up the mantle laid down by those two women honoring them by carrying on their tradition, and applying it to her own life and circumstances. While literal chains were no longer attached to her wrists and ankles, she was all too aware of the shackles of inequality and racism that still kept her bound and her obligation to resist it. What better way to honor than imitation?

In the classic book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in a Time of Cholera, the main characters, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, fall in love in their youth and spend the rest of their lives trying to be together before finally finding partnership in their old age. But in the meantime, Fermina marries an older man in an almost arranged marriage and Florentino pledges his love and respect but then fades in the living out of that pledge. As the novel winds through decades and the history of Columbia, it becomes a lesson on the nature of love, and how love can have many facets, some more helpful and healthy than others and how we have to choose what love we employ…trivial love that is only interested in pleasure, or deep, dedicated love that has resilience and hope.

Is it enough for Peter to honor Jesus with tents on the side of a mountain or, by the time that Mark has told the whole story, do we instead see a Peter who understands honor in a deeper way, so he stops thinking about monuments are starts thinking about how he lives, what he does and how he is going to follow Jesus? For while we lift up honoring in our society – honor of leadership, of the military, even of Jesus – what we mean by honoring is as important as what the characters in Marquez’s novel learn about love. And when we trivialize it, honor becomes only another superficial nod, losing any transformative property it might have, while we forge ahead in the direction we were already going.

This little lesson about honor sits beside me right now as I participate with Tulsa Public Schools in a process about school names and what the connection is between what we recognize as historically significant and what we honor, which seems to be a different thing than mere recognition. Do we simply react to a growing media-driven focus on schools names and statues, or do we use that as a chance to think more deeply about our own history, often tainted and difficult…or an opportunity to imagine the differences between the acknowledgement of historic figures and what it means to honor them? Can we understand that honor is something that can be placed on someone by a particular set of people and then removed by a different set of people, depending on who is making the decisions? This work on honoring challenges me as I think about a suggestion that we “honor” the military with a giant parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in our nation’s capitol. Does the ticker-tape honor or does that come about more effectively by making sure that our VA hospital system is viable and effective, ensuring the best care possible for those we ask to fight and die for us? The lesson sits with me as I think about what it means to follow Jesus today, not just worship him, and whether or not he really would advocate for Medicare funding for the most vulnerable, even if there was a slim margin who took advantage of that care? I wonder if I honor Jesus best with the loudest praise song I can manage, or with time spent accompanying an undocumented person to her hearing in front of an immigration judge? Do we honor Jesus best with a national prayer breakfast or by feeding the poor and caring for the sick?

It sits with me as we work our way through “Black History Month”, which really should be known just as ‘history month”, but this warped sense of honoring leaves us setting aside a day for Dr. King, but whitewashing his message so boldly that the holiday dedicated to him becomes as inert as Groundhog Day. It leaves us with a #MeToo movement seeking respect and real honor for women standing alongside the weak dismissal of clear and present domestic abuse and campaigns for “women-friendly” snack foods. Seriously? Doritos are too loud for the delicate nature of femininity? I know that PBS likes every show to be set in the Victorian Era, doesn’t mean we all want to go back there!

Honoring someone means, in the most profound sense of the word, that we seek to emulate them, just as honoring an ideal means that we try and live that out with our own actions, in our own day and time. That ought to have an impact when we think about the values espoused by those whose names adorn our schools, or when we consider honoring with a parade that looks like it belongs on the streets of Moscow or Pyongyang. And it ought to be an alarm to us when the word “honor” gets thrown around, like a political football, cheapening both it’s value and it’s cost…for cheap honor is as worthless as cheap grace, which Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who resisted the Nazis once described as forgiveness without repentance, communion without confession, and grace without discipleship.

Following Jesus can be dangerous work…just ask the disciples, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Dr. King. For those of us sitting here, following him is unlikely to get us killed. More likely it will mean uncomfortable conversations, hard decisions about where and how we use our money or spend our time, or discernment in how we resist – even when it’s resistance to something we’re told is a matter of “honor”. There’s a reason, after all, that Jesus doesn’t listen to Peter’s tent plans, a reason he comes back down from the mountain, and a reason he tells them to keep all that dazzling white fireworks show to themselves. There’s a reason that the only time in the New Testament that we hear the voice of God is at the Jordan, for Jesus’ baptism, and here on this mountaintop. And both times the voice says – listen to him. Listen to this boundary-busting healer who spreads grace and seeks justice, practices forgiveness and loves wastefully, welcoming the stranger, caring for the burdened and asking us to consider love for a change.

Maybe we ought to consider that good advice.